We rumbled over the plains and valleys, climbed the Sierras to
the clouds, and looked down upon summer-clad California. And I
will remark here, in passing, that all scenery in California
requires distance to give it its highest charm. The mountains are
imposing in their sublimity and their majesty of form and
altitude, from any point of view—but one must have distance to
soften their ruggedness and enrich their tintings; a Californian
forest is best at a little distance, for there is a sad poverty
of variety in species, the trees being chiefly of one monotonous
family—redwood, pine, spruce, fir—and so, at a near view there
is a wearisome sameness of attitude in their rigid arms,
stretched down ward and outward in one continued and reiterated
appeal to all men to “Sh!—don’t say a word!—you might disturb
somebody!” Close at hand, too, there is a reliefless and
relentless smell of pitch and turpentine; there is a ceaseless
melancholy in their sighing and complaining foliage; one walks
over a soundless carpet of beaten yellow bark and dead spines of
the foliage till he feels like a wandering spirit bereft of a
footfall; he tires of the endless tufts of needles and yearns for
substantial, shapely leaves; he looks for moss and grass to loll
upon, and finds none, for where there is no bark there is naked
clay and dirt, enemies to pensive musing and clean apparel. Often
a grassy plain in California, is what it should be, but often,
too, it is best contemplated at a distance, because although its
grass blades are tall, they stand up vindictively straight and
self-sufficient, and are unsociably wide apart, with uncomely
spots of barren sand between.
One of the queerest things I know of, is to hear tourists from
“the States” go into ecstasies over the loveliness of
“ever-blooming California.” And they always do go into that sort
of ecstasies. But perhaps they would modify them if they knew how
old Californians, with the memory full upon them of the
dust-covered and questionable summer greens of Californian
“verdure,” stand astonished, and filled with worshipping
admiration, in the presence of the lavish richness, the brilliant
green, the infinite freshness, the spend-thrift variety of form
and species and foliage that make an Eastern landscape a vision
of Paradise itself. The idea of a man falling into raptures over
grave and sombre California, when that man has seen New England’s
meadow-expanses and her maples, oaks and cathedral-windowed elms
decked in summer attire, or the opaline splendors of autumn
descending upon her forests, comes very near being funny—would
be, in fact, but that it is so pathetic. No land with an
unvarying climate can be very beautiful. The tropics are not, for
all the sentiment that is wasted on them. They seem beautiful at
first, but sameness impairs the charm by and by. Change is the
handmaiden Nature requires to do her miracles with. The land that
has four well-defined seasons, cannot lack beauty, or pall with
monotony. Each season brings a world of enjoyment and interest in
the watching of its unfolding, its gradual, harmonious
development, its culminating graces—and just as one begins to
tire of it, it passes away and a radical change comes, with new
witcheries and new glories in its train. And I think that to one
in sympathy with nature, each season, in its turn, seems the
loveliest.
San Francisco, a truly fascinating city to live in, is stately
and handsome at a fair distance, but close at hand one notes that
the architecture is mostly old-fashioned, many streets are made
up of decaying, smoke-grimed, wooden houses, and the barren
sand-hills toward the outskirts obtrude themselves too
prominently. Even the kindly climate is sometimes pleasanter when
read about than personally experienced, for a lovely, cloudless
sky wears out its welcome by and by, and then when the longed for
rain does come it stays. Even the playful earthquake is better
contemplated at a dis—
However there are varying opinions about that.
The climate of San Francisco is mild and singularly equable.
The thermometer stands at about seventy degrees the year round.
It hardly changes at all. You sleep under one or two light
blankets Summer and Winter, and never use a mosquito bar. Nobody
ever wears Summer clothing. You wear black broadcloth—if you
have it—in August and January, just the same. It is no colder,
and no warmer, in the one month than the other. You do not use
overcoats and you do not use fans. It is as pleasant a climate as
could well be contrived, take it all around, and is doubtless the
most unvarying in the whole world. The wind blows there a good
deal in the summer months, but then you can go over to Oakland,
if you choose—three or four miles away—it does not blow there.
It has only snowed twice in San Francisco in nineteen years, and
then it only remained on the ground long enough to astonish the
children, and set them to wondering what the feathery stuff
was.
During eight months of the year, straight along, the skies are
bright and cloudless, and never a drop of rain falls. But when
the other four months come along, you will need to go and steal
an umbrella. Because you will require it. Not just one day, but
one hundred and twenty days in hardly varying succession. When
you want to go visiting, or attend church, or the theatre, you
never look up at the clouds to see whether it is likely to rain
or not—you look at the almanac. If it is Winter, it will
rain—and if it is Summer, it won’t rain, and you cannot help it.
You never need a lightning-rod, because it never thunders and it
never lightens. And after you have listened for six or eight
weeks, every night, to the dismal monotony of those quiet rains,
you will wish in your heart the thunder would leap and crash and
roar along those drowsy skies once, and make everything
alive—you will wish the prisoned lightnings would cleave the
dull firmament asunder and light it with a blinding glare for one
little instant. You would give anything to hear the old familiar
thunder again and see the lightning strike somebody. And along in
the Summer, when you have suffered about four months of lustrous,
pitiless sunshine, you are ready to go down on your knees and
plead for rain—hail—snow—thunder and lightning—anything to
break the monotony—you will take an earthquake, if you cannot
do any better. And the chances are that you’ll get it, too.
San Francisco is built on sand hills, but they are prolific
sand hills. They yield a generous vegetation. All the rare
flowers which people in “the States” rear with such patient care
in parlor flower-pots and green-houses, flourish luxuriantly in
the open air there all the year round. Calla lilies, all sorts of
geraniums, passion flowers, moss roses—I do not know the names
of a tenth part of them. I only know that while New Yorkers are
burdened with banks and drifts of snow, Californians are burdened
with banks and drifts of flowers, if they only keep their hands
off and let them grow. And I have heard that they have also that
rarest and most curious of all the flowers, the beautiful
Espiritu Santo, as the Spaniards call it—or flower of the Holy
Spirit—though I thought it grew only in Central America—down on
the Isthmus. In its cup is the daintiest little facsimile of a
dove, as pure as snow. The Spaniards have a superstitious
reverence for it. The blossom has been conveyed to the States,
submerged in ether; and the bulb has been taken thither also, but
every attempt to make it bloom after it arrived, has failed.
I have elsewhere spoken of the endless Winter of Mono,
California, and but this moment of the eternal Spring of San
Francisco. Now if we travel a hundred miles in a straight line,
we come to the eternal Summer of Sacramento. One never sees
Summer-clothing or mosquitoes in San Francisco—but they can be
found in Sacramento. Not always and unvaryingly, but about one
hundred and forty-three months out of twelve years, perhaps.
Flowers bloom there, always, the reader can easily
believe—people suffer and sweat, and swear, morning, noon and
night, and wear out their stanchest energies fanning themselves.
It gets hot there, but if you go down to Fort Yuma you will find
it hotter. Fort Yuma is probably the hottest place on earth. The
thermometer stays at one hundred and twenty in the shade there
all the time—except when it varies and goes higher. It is a U.S.
military post, and its occupants get so used to the terrific heat
that they suffer without it. There is a tradition (attributed to
John Phenix [It has been purloined by fifty different scribblers
who were too poor to invent a fancy but not ashamed to steal
one.—M. T.]) that a very, very wicked soldier died there, once,
and of course, went straight to the hottest corner of
perdition,—and the next day he telegraphed back for his
blankets. There is no doubt about the truth of this
statement—there can be no doubt about it. I have seen the place
where that soldier used to board. In Sacramento it is fiery
Summer always, and you can gather roses, and eat strawberries and
ice-cream, and wear white linen clothes, and pant and perspire,
at eight or nine o’clock in the morning, and then take the cars,
and at noon put on your furs and your skates, and go skimming
over frozen Donner Lake, seven thousand feet above the valley,
among snow banks fifteen feet deep, and in the shadow of grand
mountain peaks that lift their frosty crags ten thousand feet
above the level of the sea.
There is a transition for you! Where will you find another
like it in the Western hemisphere? And some of us have swept
around snow-walled curves of the Pacific Railroad in that
vicinity, six thousand feet above the sea, and looked down as the
birds do, upon the deathless Summer of the Sacramento Valley,
with its fruitful fields, its feathery foliage, its silver
streams, all slumbering in the mellow haze of its enchanted
atmosphere, and all infinitely softened and spiritualized by
distance—a dreamy, exquisite glimpse of fairyland, made all the
more charming and striking that it was caught through a forbidden
gateway of ice and snow, and savage crags and precipices.
